68 comments:

I've seen quite a few like this too, posted by people who want to argue that we should allow all the Syrians in.

One even mentioned that she knew it ended up "badly for those receiving the refugees" but still thought it should be done.

Nevermind that for over 100 years the Indians actually kept people from settling until the plagues started. The Pilgrims literally moved into the houses of those who'd just died of plague and were only allowed to settle so as to be an army vs the inland tribes who'd not yet been plague-ridden. So.... refugees, brought in to be an army, and eventually those already there were 92-97% wiped out, depending on which research paper/estimate you're using...... and they think this is an argument FOR allowing the refugees in?

This has come up before. The argument pretends to be an analogy, but it really isn't. It is, instead, an attack on standing. It works like this: Because European colonists were immigrants, their descendants have no standing to criticize immigration policy. The eventual destruction of Native American cultures by European colonists is common knowledge and thus serves as ironical reinforcement for the attack.

Put simply, the literal analogy suggests "be grateful that your ancestors were allowed in" but the visceral meaning is "you have no standing to complain, so shut up."

The "Syrian" refugees in question would be coming from U.N. refugee camps, where they would have been held for some time and fillig out papers, etc. for "screening." It does not matter so much how good the screening is; that there is screening at all and it takes time and effort is enough to make most baddies "self-screen," since for them it would be easier to get fake documents. Or they can go to Mexico or Canada and walk in from there, considering what the Obama administration has done to our land border security.

This is a fake uproar; people are upset, and rigtfully so, but do not know exactly how to express it, so they throw a fit about something.

I'm a native American adult who is still angry that the political class of Amerindians has more rights than I and my sons have. I grew up in Arizona, where Amerindians have lots of land, lots of special rights, and lots of sovereignty, and as a group, they shit all over their special things. We public-school white kids were force-fed the great native American history that really wasn't great.

And stop it with the European culture replaced Amerindian culture. There are blue coyotes howling at the stars all over Scottsdale. Boo hoo.

The actual message is "Be naive, kindhearted, welcoming sap and have your culture obliterated by a ruthless, puritanical, invading culture."

The problem is this is a mutation of the original meme trotted out, which was the "Baby Jesus was a refugee; you hillbillies would turn back baby Jesus" family of images and slogans trotted out by the anti-Conservative Good Folk of the Internet.

Because accusing the Right Wing Religious Wingnuts of hypocrisy is an itch that just can't be scratched enough.

At some point some hipster with an ironically poor grasp of irony made the connection of religious (nay,puritanical) immigrants who happened to be white being welcomed in the New World by Rousseau's (he was French, you know) Noble Savages and thought that was just a delicious sauce to add to the ridicule stew.

If that seems muddled it is, but the thing is, these memes aren't about changing minds, they are about signalling that you belong to the Correct Tribe. Once enough of the tribe starts chanting something, no matter how stupid it is, the rest of the tribe feels like they need to chime in just so the rest of the tribe knows that they're all on the same page.

Let's face it, at this point in time our "culture" is a cargo cult worshiping the wreckage of the Enlightenment. And it could very well get worse.

That Thanksgiving graphic should serve as a lesson as to what happens when a nation loses control of it's borders. Texas in 1836 is also a good lesson in failed border control. Santa Anna was merely attempting to enforce Mexican law and began the process by which Mexico lost about 50% of it's national territory by the 1850's to an unchecked invasion by illegal aliens.

If you favor letting more Syrians in and you want to convince anyone, you don't try and shame them--all the "baby Jesus" and "Indians!" memes aren't going to move someone who is afraid terrorists are going to try and infiltrate the refugees. Instead, explain why terrorists wouldn't be coming via refugee camps because the screening is severe, and why that risk is overblown.

But then, this isn't really about convincing anyone--social media is never really about that. Instead, it's about signaling to your friends that you have the right opinions, that you're on the right side, and you can sneer and troll the opposition.

To expand on my earlier comment, the subtext for these agitprop images is not history, it's identity politics. It's very similar to the Yoga story actually. Once you define your ideological opponents as the inheritors of "colonialism and western supremacy" (to borrow a phrase), you have no need to respect their viewpoint. The logic that John brings to bear on the purported analogy is just one more example of colonial supremacy, and thus, invalid.

Because all political arguments nowadays boil down to either "You are for this" or "You are against this"...

There is no room in acceptable dialogue for the middle ground; the, "I am for this so as long as we do xyz" argument. Nope, that means you took a side.

This applies to both extremes: the far left wants to argue as if they want unrestricted immigration, even though they are for common sense restrictions. The far right wants to wall off the country and, if a refugee crisis gets worse from people stranded, well that's not our problem.

Our country gets stronger for steady, well assimilated immigration. Unfortunately, over the last several decades we have had some significant breakdowns in assimilation. We are weaker for it - both in our own country and in our ability to absorb large amounts of others.

The Obama administration will be quite happy to have a futile argument about a few tens of thousands Middle East refugees that, under this program, could only come here in government supervised planeloads or shiploads, while millions of "undocumented Democrats" walk unhindered in over our southern border.

The "Syrians" cannot walk into this country like they do in Europe, though that is the filmclips the MSM choose to accompany their reporting on this issue.Speaking of those clips, looking at them, it does not look like these are the "poor and unfortunate," but more those with a little more "get up and go" that the Middle Eastern countries badly need to keep at home, if they wish to ever get out of "the poorest countries in the world" category.

It is like after Viet Nam; those who left - for the U.S. or elsewhere - were not the die-hard Vietcong.

phantommut: At some point some hipster with an ironically poor grasp of irony...

Is there any other kind?

Hilariously inapt analogies, snarkily delivered, are as close as a Facebook emoter ever gets to higher-order thinking.

Shame that output of "prestige" press pundits are becoming indistinguishable from that of social-media feel-mongers.

If that seems muddled it is, but the thing is, these memes aren't about changing minds, they are about signalling that you belong to the Correct Tribe. Once enough of the tribe starts chanting something, no matter how stupid it is, the rest of the tribe feels like they need to chime in just so the rest of the tribe knows that they're all on the same page.

That's why the right's continuing to argue with them as if they were amenable to reason, or attempting to defend themselves against the left's accusations, is so foolish. The left went into "never apologize, never explain/MUH FEELS!" mode a long time ago. (Toward the opposition, that is. Haven't quite got the hang of "never apologize" toward internal opposition, hahaha. But conservatives desperately need to adopt the "stop fucking apologizing" part of the strategy.)

Let's face it, at this point in time our "culture" is a cargo cult worshiping the wreckage of the Enlightenment. And it could very well get worse.

Some small irony that America as it exists today as a desired location for refugees is because it was subjugated by Christians many centuries ago. And where are the refugees arriving from? Nations that were subjugated my Muslims nearly a thousand years prior to that.

These refugees are not coming directly from Syria. They are coming from Turkey. Turkey is a Muslim country and is sufficiently large to take in it's former Imperial subjects. Other than the Christians from Syria there is no reason to do for the Muslims what the Muslims won't do for their own.

The Pilgrims had peace treaty with the Indian tribal Chief. The problem that arose was that the the Indians grew corn and the Pilgrims raised free range cattle that ate the Indian's corn. The Indians would kill the trespassing cows and the Pilgrims would kill the Indians and the Indians would gather together and attack the Pilgrims who would gather together and attack the Indians.

The winner was the one who had the most people living at the end of the year.

Ahmad Al Mohammad, 25, who blew himself up, may have entered Europe as part of the migration of refugees from war-torn Syria. He was born in Idlib, Syria, and had been issued a Syrian emergency passport after landing on the Greek island of Leros, according to CNN.

We'll see on this one. But do we know about the family origins of the others?

"Let’s also remember who the vast majority of these refugees are: women, children, orphans, survivors of torture, people desperately in need medical help.To turn them away and say there is no way you can ever get here would play right into the terrorists’ hands."

1) "Vast" majority?2) "say there is no way you can ever get here"? Pause = never?

Re 1836 Texas, a mostly fair point though some of the gringo immigrants were legal under Mexican law. That brings up the issue of assimilation. Mexico moved in the direction of requiring assimilation (it required immigrants to convert to Catholicism), but the effort was inadequate.

The melting pot is what let this country survive heavy immigration, but the clerisy now works hard to frustrate the melting pot and promote instead a cultural mozaic. Many Muslim immigrants, by all appearances, come not with the intent to assimilate but to set up a parallel culture. That way lies disaster.

I kind of like the idea (implicitly suggested by Bob Ellison) of putting the Syrians on the reservations. I can imagine the protest song:

They took the whole Syrian nationPut us on this reservationTook away our Sharia lifeCan’t shoot gays or beat my wifeTook away our Arabic tongueAnd taught new wave feminism to our youngAnd all the IEDs we made by hand. . .

It is all about virtue signaling: Obama wants to be seen as the enlightened good guy for letting in 10,000 refugees--never mind that his inaction is the cause of the refugee crisis in the first place. Other leftists want to convince each other that conservatives are hypocrites, for reasons that don't stand up to much (if any) scrutiny.

No doubt the tribal elites took the long view of the positive economic effects of European immigrants: in another 15 generations these will be the whales (the great white whales?) coming into to drop their children's college money in our casinos. So, its all good.

"the State Department in 2011 stopped processing Iraq refugee requests for 6 months after the Federal Bureau of Investigation uncovered evidence that several dozen terrorists from Iraq had infiltrated the united States via the refugee program"

...pausing the refugee processing wasn't a moral crisis in 2011. Why is it one now?

And speaking of the Spanish, I still remember how, when I took a U.S. History course at San Anonio College after growing up in Ohio, I learned about all the Spanish colonial activity that had occurred in the Americas between 1492 and 1607 (Jamestown) or 1620 (Plymouth).

It's like all internet memes, it's mostly about showing how clever the meme maker is.

Although, lately I've noticed that people on social media have devloped a tendency to sort of dogwhistle with posts like:

Syrian Refugees

What's wrong with people?! I go on Facebook and I see people cheering for the needless deaths of innocent men, women and children! I weep for our world!

And then sit back while people from both sides of the aisle jump in saying hear, hear! My only explanation is that they must be deluding themselves into thinking that all the affirmation is for what they really think and not based on the way different people are interpreting a vague statement.

Lauderdale Vet said "...pausing the refugee processing wasn't a moral crisis in 2011. Why is it one now? What's with all the hullabaloo, anyway?"

Same reason there's a hullabaloo about Trump's 9/11 comment.Dems don't want to talk about Obama's foreign policy, the resulting Syrian Refugee crisis or how it led to the Paris attack.

They want to talk about how Republicans are xenophobes, Islamophobes, racists, etc. With a little luck they can maneuver the Republican Congress into using the power of the purse to oppose Obama on Syrian Refugees. Then they can portray them as extremists who want to shut down the government.

On a side note, I would argue that it wasn't so much the pilgrims/European immigrants that subjugated the Indians, rather it was technology/knowledge. So long as they were able to exist in a bubble of ignorance they would probably have continued to live as "savages" however technology that allowed accurate navigation and travel possible burst their bubble of innocence. Additionally the Indians were not stupid, and recognized the Europeans possessed knowledge and technology that would make their lives easier, and were eager to share that knowledge.

There is something to be said for the idea that rather than taking in the refugees - at least the males of fighting age - we should give them AK-47s and send them back to fight for their country.

Except that by this time it will take a lot more than AK-47s, and - given this administration's record - I would not myself be very enthusiastic about going to war under this administration, if I still were of military age.

"Since the historical experience for Native Americans was a very bad one, you should expect American citizens who take your analogy seriously to have a negative reaction to whatever you're analogizing to European colonialists. If that isn't the reaction you're hoping to provoke, then it's time to stop and think about whether this is something you really want to post to the internet."

So, apparently, JAC recognizes that the lesson to be taken from history is, do not allow foreigners who despise your culture to occupy your territory. Also, apparently, this is a message JAC hopes his fellow Americans will not come to understand.

Why does your son hate us, Althouse? "Cause we don't want to let him marry his boyfriend? Does he know what those Syrian refugees think about him and his boyfriend?

Brando said... [hush]​[hide comment]If you favor letting more Syrians in and you want to convince anyone, you don't try and shame them--all the "baby Jesus" and "Indians!" memes aren't going to move someone who is afraid terrorists are going to try and infiltrate the refugees. Instead, explain why terrorists wouldn't be coming via refugee camps because the screening is severe, and why that risk is overblown.

This is less about terrorists infiltrating than it is recreating the European circumstances that have led to not just terrorism but also increased violence like the Rotterdam sex scandal and honor killings.

Here's an interesting read:

https://reason.com/blog/2015/11/23/who-are-the-european-jihadists

The upshot is that terrorists acting in Europe tend to be second generation immigrants of parents wholly against their participation. It seems to have more to do with lost or disaffected youth than anything else, which explains why so many of them have confounding backgrounds (the Paris woman was a night club partier, one of them seems to have been gay, for example). This suggests even an immigrants honest renouncing of all violence or radicalism doesn't matter much since they can't control their children's beliefs.

The question is whether we want to create these circumstances down the road. I think it's telling our political leadership won't even discuss it.

Well I can see that those of you who actually studied history (rather than, like most progressives believing that history started on the day you were born) have asked the existential question Sarah Palin style: "Hey Chingachchook, how did that all work out for you?"

Okay to get that Chingachchook reference, you'd have to have read James Fenimore Coooper's "The Last of the Mochicans". But the special little snowflakes that put that poster together don't read "ancient" literature either.

It seems to have more to do with lost or disaffected youth than anything else, which explains why so many of them have confounding backgrounds (the Paris woman was a night club partier, one of them seems to have been gay, for example).

The 9/11 guys were also living it up at strip clubs. If you can't stay sin free, well, here's your Get Out of Jail Free Card, just jihad your way to salvation.

Rush Limbaugh has a historically correct Thanksgiving tale, and it was the abolition of their socialist principles that enabled the Pilgrims to have such bounty as to allow a feast of thanks to God, including their neighbors the Natives, as well.

Aid to refugees had little to nothing to do with the Pilgrim success. Elimination of common land plots and common food storage, and establishment of personal landholding and property rights won the day.

I reject the premise; that there is a class of people who should be deemed 'Native Americans' with rights somehow superior to all others. Native Americans, in the context used, are simply peoples who crossed a land bridge from Eurasia and migrated from what is now Alaska to the 'New World' before Europeans crossed the Atlantic and settled here. In a real sense, they were immigrants as were the peoples who came after.

Ummm...do the people who make these Facebook posts know that Thanksgiving was (and is) about giving thanks to God? That it was not about thanking the Indians? I'm not sure their point survives the correction.

Santa Anna was a military dictator who abrogated the Mexican constitution of 1824. Three Mexican provinces rebelled against his coup, but Texas was the only one to prevail. Hispanic Texicans fought alongside Davy Crockett and others to defeat Santa Anna. It was not a White Americans taking over Hispanic Tejas thing.